SonicFileFinder 2.2 Released

My colleague Jens Schaller has released a new version of his free Visual Studio add-in SonicFileFinder, adding support for Visual Studio 2010.

• Announcement on his blog
• Download on the SonicFileFinder website

As far as I can tell, there are no new features compared to version 2.1, but good to know that this add-in is now available for VS2010.

For those who a wondering what SonicFileFinder is about: SonicFileFinder implements a command for searching and opening files in a Visual Studio solution, which is very nice especially in large projects.

This may sound familiar to users of JetBrain’s ReSharper, which has a “Go To File” feature. But in my opinion SonicFileFinder does a better job overall:

• While ReSharper (4.5) does a prefix search by default, SonicFileFinder searches for any occurrence of the entered text inside a file name. In a long list of file names (e.g. all starting with “Page…”), this allows me to focus on the part that makes the difference (e.g. “Render” in PageRenderBuffer.cs). In ReSharper I would have to type “*Render*”, which can be shortened to “*Render” (which isn’t even correct). Note that SonicFileFinder does support wildcards, of course.
   
• SonicFileFinder remembers the last input (and thus the last result list) without a noticeable delay of the popup. If I want to search for something different, I can type right away, so this behavior doesn’t slow me down. But where it really shines is when I’m not even sure what file exactly I was looking for – I open one file, notice that it’s not the one I want, re-open the pop-up dialog and now I can choose another one from the result list without re-entering the search text.
  
• SonicFileFinder allows me to open multiple files at one (nice for service interfaces and implementations).
  
• SonicFileFinder lets me open either a Windows Explorer or Command Line window in the directory containing a specific file.